It was announced on Tuesday that the Right Hon. Sir
Edgar Speyer, Bart., the well-known financier and head of the corporation controlling the London Underground Rail- ways, bad retired from partnership in the New York firm of Speyer and Co. The reason given to the New York Stock Exchange is that by the terms of the King's proclamation of September 9th he was precluded, as resident in London and a British subject, from having any direct or indirect con- nexion with any firm doing business with persons resident in Germany. In view of the pro-German activities of Mr. James Speyer, the senior partner in the New York house, and also a partner in the Frankfort and London houses, Sir Edgar Speyer's action seems to us not only desirable but inevitable. Naturalized British subjects are under a special obligation to regularize their position most scrupu- lously when the country of their adoption is at war with that of their origin, and any one who has ever read the oath of a Privy Councillor, which Sir Edgar Speyer took five years ago, will be not a little surprised that he did not take this step on the very first day that war was declared.
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